FAO has launched an open online consultation in order to explore and document how agriculture policies and strategies can address child labour in agriculture, including the role of agricultural stakeholders.

In  July  2019,  the  United  Nations  General  Assembly  has  declared  2021  the ‘International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour’. Today, 71 percent of child labour worldwide are found in the agriculture sector. If child labour in agriculture is left unaddressed, it tends to perpetrate a cycle of poverty for the children involved, their families and communities. These children are likely to be the rural poor of tomorrow. For this reason, agriculture stakeholders have an essential and unique role to play. While critical solutions to end child labour lie in the agriculture sector, to date, they have been largely undocumented or overlooked.

In observance of the International Year in 2021, and in order to contribute to the progress in achieving target 8.7 of the Sustainable Development Goals, the online consultation aims to collect experience and case studies from a wide range of different participants worldwide. We invite you to share your experiences on the effectiveness of policies and strategies related to eliminating child labour in rural areas. Your comments and inputs will be instrumental to identify and document good and promising practices for which evidence-based research and replication could be explored. The results of the consultation will be widely promoted throughout the International Year and feed into the work of the International Partnership for Cooperation on Child Labour in Agriculture (IPCCLA) and the Alliance 8.7.

The discussion will be open from 27 April to 25 May 2020 and will be available on FAO’s Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition. Contributions can be made in all official UN languages: Arabic, English, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish.

We warmly invite to you register here or visit the discussion directly here.

In the meantime, feel free to contact [email protected] for any additional information you may require and please do not hesitate to share this information with your professional networks.